Tag: business models

The startup process is a dramatic roller coaster ride. It’s thrilling when you discover new gold mines, but crushing when you realize that your ideas are not that novel. My team had to go through the ride four times. Looking back, the biggest lesson I learned in the past six months is having the courage […] more »

Click here to read the entire series In early 2012, just about a year ago, the Journalism Accelerator invited a half-dozen people with a range of unique roles in the news production mix, to identify the most crucial challenges facing publishers at that moment in time. No enormous surprise: Money was the top concern. More […] more »

Imagine a well-known Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Wanting to repeat his success, he scrutinizes all his articles and discovers they contain the letters “E” and “R” 10 times more frequently than any other letters. In his next article, he focuses on increasing the use of these letters, and then plans on teaching his new-found secret during […] more »

People in news don’t generally think of innovation as their job. It’s that old CP Snow thing of the two cultures, where innovation sits on the science not the arts side. I had my own experience of this at the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference in Washington a couple of months ago. After one […] more »

It may be impolitic to admit this, but I’m weary of the Great News Business Model Hunt. For those journalists who have just woken up to the changes in their industry, I know that this issue couldn’t be more fascinating and pertinent. But if you worked in the news business on the web from the […] more »

My writing on PBS Idea Lab was introduced to me as a way to publicly discuss the growth of Spot.Us, my Knight News Challenge project. I’ve received kudos for being honest in my blog posts. I’m comfortable talking about where Spot.Us is falling short, and where we are exceeding expectations. I think we are doing […] more »

During an otherwise mundane story about Microsoft’s recent decision to offer a free, web-based version of its Office suite of products, I was struck by this sentence in an Associated Press story: With Office 2010, Microsoft must decide how much software it can give away online without undermining its lucrative desktop software business. If it […] more »

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about organizational behavior and innovation, and how the former can hinder the latter. It comes to mind not because I like to dwell on the negative, but rather out of hope that understanding the root cause of problems can help us all avoid the mistakes of the past. This […] more »

Government money to bail out newspapers is a rather “un-American” suggestion. It has been put forward by various commentators who feel that emergency circumstances call for drastic measures. After all, it’s not just jobs at stake, but the survival of a key pillar of democracy. If newspapers go under, the argument goes, so too does […] more »

I met Steve Katz of Mother Jones in 2007 at a Personal Democracy Forum conference and he has been a fantastic resource for brain-picking. Recently Katz and I have been having an interesting conversation about the funding model for Spot.Us, the future of non-profit journalism, and other related topics via our blogs. Now that our […] more »